The present invention relates to a tray for presenting food to a pet. The tray comprises, seen in the use position, a topside, an underside and a peripheral side extending between the topside and the underside of the tray.
The term “pet” may in this disclosure include any animal, preferably an animal owned by a human. As example can be mentioned animals like dogs, cats and hamsters. The term includes however also wild animals held in captivity in e.g. a zoo.
Animals have followed the mankind since the beginning of time and many different types of devices for feeding the animals have been developed also during the years.
The object of these developments may have been to make it easy and convenient to feed the animals but also to get healthy and useful animals.
Generally is a pet kept of a human for companionship and amusement and the human owner therefore also have a natural interest in the welfare of the pet. The feeding of the pets is in this connection of great importance.
The food to be eaten of e.g. a dog is normally placed in a bowl-shaped dish in an amount necessary for that particular dog. The dog will, when being presented for the food in that way, owing to its nature swallow the food as quickly as possible. Such rapid consumption of food may however be detrimental for the dog, which afterwards often is belching, vomiting and releasing malodorous air from the stomach.
For avoiding such events, which are very unpleasant for both the dog and the owner of the dog, dishes are developed with different kinds of obstructions, which are arranged for motivating the dog to eat in a relatively slow pace.
Such an improved dish for feeding a pet is known from U.S. Pat. No. 7,207,291 B1. This dish is by means of radially extending ribs, which are formed on the bottom of the dish, divided up into a plurality of smaller sections disposing each only a fraction of the total meal to be eaten of the pet.
This improvement serves to limit the amount of food, which the pet has access to at a given time whereby the eating speed of the pet automatically is slowed down.
A draw back is however that pets of different kinds and sizes cannot use the same size of dishes so that it is necessary to market more sizes of such dishes resulting in heavy expenses to tools and production.
Another draw back consist in the fact that eating of the known dish doesn't stimulate the inherent nature of pets even though the eating process makes up an important part of the life of pets. The missing stimulation tends to cause the pets to be lazy or per contra aggressive and dangerous.
It therefore is important to stimulate the inherent nature of the pets. Such stimulation may take place in large mazes for pets. An example of such a maze is known from the U.S. Pat. No. 3,260,236. Said maze is arranged for leading a whole pet through the maze and the construction is therefore voluminous and costly and moreover complicated and the known maze cannot be utilized for food for pets since it is assembled by a number of different parts by means of joints in which food can hide and gradually taint.